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This blog is predominately about camera trapping in California. We camera trap to save our souls and to teach primary school students about biology and conservation. We will also touch on other camera trapping news and musings, sets from afar, mediocre herpetology, sucky birding, and other natural history discussions.

Friday, December 27, 2013

I've have been waiting for the Say's Phoebe that over wintered on the UCSC campus the last two years to show up and was starting to think it might have met its maker. Finally on Christmas Eve, as I was leaving the lab I saw a Say's Phoebe in the usual spot. I don't know that this is the same individual for sure, but I like to think it might be.

As you can see from one of the photos it likes to perch and hunt from a fence right next to the road so I get to do some road birding on my way into and out of campus every day.

In 2012-2013 I saw a Say's Phoebe in this spot as early as November and then saw it pretty regularly (several times a week with a 40 second search as I drive by, so pretty reliably) until February.

In the 2011-2012 Winter I saw one in January through February 2012.

We'll have to wait and see who leaves the UCSC campus first this Winter, me or the old Say's Phoebe.

On a totally separate note, it has been a while since I have posted at the Flickr rework has made it really difficult to embed photos using hmtl into a post. Looks to be the new frames feature. I'm also not super happy with the apparent loss of the old organization tab in Flickr. I'll need to spend some time with the new lay out to try and figure it all out and hopefully I will grow to like the changes, but as of now, get off my lawn Yahoo.

UPDATE: After posting this I started reading some Flickr forums and realized that the new Beta photo page is fucked if you want old school html embedding. So I opted out of Beta until they get it fixed and reembedded the images in this post. I also found the old batch organizing tool which is now called Organizr and is in a submenu rather than the header. Damn Flickr.